Oil Spill: BP Ousts CEO Tony Hayward | TIME.com

Though BP was officially denying the rumors, Hayward’s departure has long been considered of when, not if. Since the spill began on April 20, Hayward has been a gaffe machine. Here are just a few of his greatest hits:

-On April 29, according to the New York Times, early on in the spill Hayward told his fellow BP executives in frustration: “What the hell did we do to deserve this?” (Well, according to the early results of investigations into the Deepwater Horizon accident, quite a lot.)

-On May 13 Hayward told the Guardian that the oil spill was “relatively tiny”:

The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume. In fact by that time, with the broken well gushing up to 60,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf, as much as 1.4 million barrels of crude might have already been lost, making it already worse the than the Exxon Valdez spill.

-On May 18, Hayward told Sky News that the environmental impact of the spill “will be very, very modest.” That’s, uh, not true.

-On May 30, as he was touring the Louisiana coast and apologizing for the spill, Hayward told reporters “I would like my life back,” referring to the way the spill had taken over his time. There’s even video!